Sunday, November 27, 2005

Fuel for schools

The Council, Idaho school district was experiencing rising energy prices while using outdated oil and electric heating systems; meanwhile, the Forest Service was burning tons of wood from the Payette National Forest just to thin out the forest to prevent fires. Solution: take advantage of the Forest Service's Fuel for Schools program, which provides biomass (forest debris) that can be burned for use in heating systems, a move which will save them one million dollars over the next fifteen years.

You can read more about this brilliant bit of community partnership work by reading this article.

2 Comments:

Brett: I just got off a conference call with western states' air quality specialists and a topic of discussion ws the Fuel For Schools program. The bottom line was some had experience with this program and the units and smoke emissions can be significant enough that some school playgrounds have been shut down from excess smoke. Evidently the units are often plumbed directly into the old boiler to take advantage of the existing stack. Less plume rise and incomplete combustion results in excess smoke from the units and evidently a LOT of smoke. Have you heard of such issues? Interested as Colorado has a huge excess of beetle kill trees and it is only a matter of time till someone wants to do this in Colorado and use the dying trees. Steven 27/Feb/2008

I wasn't familiar with the details of the program - just admired the ingenuity of the model. Certainly wouldn't advocate anything unsafe or harmful to children - obviously implementation is a critical issue.

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In an era of reduced resources and increased expectations, schools are overlooking the most obvious and effective solution to both challenges: enlisting community leaders as true partners in education. That's what I write about.